Bootlegger Bookends

A few days ago, I posted (on my football-related Twitter account) the first article I was able to find about the Ottawa Bootleggers. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to post it here too, but here it is for those of you who are wise enough to not have Twitter accounts. Blow it up with a click.

It is from the April 26th, 1988, Ottawa Citizen. It's certainly possible that another local paper had a story about them prior to that one but I have not come across any.

In attempting to flesh out the Bootleggers page some more last night, I realized that I had the information about their final two seasons all wrong. It was so wrong that I wonder now where I got it in the first place.

The Bootleggers had a rather terrible 1-9 record in 1991 under new ownership and new head coach Larry Cates. But they were a much better team in 1992, posting a 7-3 regular season record and, I believe, winning two playoff games (I may need to edit this part of the post later).

For a good part of the season, the 1992 Bootleggers were quarterbacked by Chris Flynn who is now in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and had been an Ottawa Rough Riders draft pick the previous year. It amazes me, looking back, that the team was not able to recapture the proverbial "lightning in a bottle" that it had from  from 1988 to 1990.

Regardless, this post began with what I believe to be the first major article about the Bootleggers so now we'll look at the back end. What follows is a brief recap of their last playoff win...

...and final game. Rather modest coverage for a team that was quite competitive.

There was a bit more coverage after that...

Since the Bootleggers are today's subject, I will take the opportunity to draw a little attention to a comment left by Warner Miles, who I suppose would be one of few people to have been on the team for at least part of all five seasons, on an earlier post.

To all my Bootlegger friends, if you haven’t read my book and are looking for a little diversion in these trying times, I’ve put a PDF version on my Google drive. You can download it (here).

Sure, now that I've paid for it. ;-)

It came as a surprise to me that some of the photography in the book comes off better in the pdf format. Go figure. Even if you're not crazy about reading an electronic version of a book, run your way through it just to check those out.